Complete SEO Tutorial - Start from the beginning!

Complete SEO Tutorial - Start from the beginning!

SEO the short form of Search Enigne Optimization, is a tremendous need of the day for many webmasters...

You have made a web site and consider it as the #1 site that you could have ever made but, is that the case with the people of this world and most importantly, the search engines??

It's a fact that people are coming from the search engines and to let the world know that you exist you have to make search engines 'love' your site... and to do so you have to just take care of few things as listed below and I asure you that as you master these things you will certainly grow!!!

1. Site Concept This should be the subject that you like most! It could be anything. If you like travelling then you can make wonderful site on travel based, if you like animals you can come up with that site... just sit down for a minute and just think what do i talk about and what do you do for entertainment... because everybody has something special in him that makes him diferent from others.

2. Keywords Now, the next step would be to know what people actually type in the search engines to search for to get to the site that you want to make. Go to http://inventory.overture.com and type in the words that you think that people will type to see you site.

Extract few keywords from it but at the beginning just consider those that have less number of websites already on! Less websites= Less Competetion!!

3. On-page Optimization This is the very important section... Here you have to consider various things to develop a nice site. Your title tag must contain your primary keyword, the H1 to H6 tags must contain your keywords... your body text must have a proper balance of text and keywords in them... so that it is good for both the HUMAN and search engine ROBOTS...

4. Off-page Optimization This is of tremendous importance... These days search engines are considering sites that have proper balance of link exchange. Link exchange is a very important tool to enhance the popularity of you site...

Few places where you can make link exchange are

http://www.honest-links.net http://www.likmarket.net

http://www.link-exchange.ws

http://www.linkalizer.com

5. Wait and Watch as you grow! Now, that you have done all the things properly it's time to see the results... this could take some time but the rewards are just incredible!!

In the next coming article I would tell you how to get listed in the GOOGLE search engine in just 24-48 hours!!

Hope to see you on the top!!

Why is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) important?

Why is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) important?



Did Did you get tired one day from everybody's continual insistence that the Internet would revolutionise the way companies do business? Therefore, to 'get with the times' you hired a company to produce a tasteful, professional and up-to-date website. You integrated it with your backend accounting and financial systems so people could order products directly from the website. You then sat back and waited for the cash to roll in, right?

Now raise your hand if it didn't turn out to be that simple.

In the mad rush to get something (and anything) onto the Internet, companies made the leap unprepared. Many businesses forgot to ask one simply question: How will customers actually find our website? Since you literally share the Internet with another million websites, it is an important question. Being a perceptive marketing person, you realise there are four ways Internet users typically locate your site:


1. Learning it from traditional media such as TV, print, radio, brochures, business cards etc.
2. Link from another website
3. Recommended by someone
4. Found using a Search Engine (SE) such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN etc.



You only have major control over the first method - throw enough money into advertising and everyone will know about the site. You can even buy links from other websites such as the Yellow Pages. For companies that don't have the marketing budget of a large multi-national corporation, the fourth method is the only real manner of attracting new visitors. To make SEs a viable method, your website must appear in the top ten search results. Why? Nine out of ten Internet surfers do not go past the first 30 search results. Many do not even proceed further than the top 10 results.

How do you get your website into the top 10? An industry has arisen with the means and knowledge to answer this question. The process they employ is generalised as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is a methodology (some would argue art) employed to improve a website's rank in SE results given targeted 'keywords'. Keywords are the phrase(s) your target market uses to limit search results to locate your product or services. For example, you want your website to have a high rank when someone searches for 'ipod accessories'; but you don't really care if it rates highly for 'tropical fish' - that is not your target.

The key to this industry lies in the fact that SEs are actually very limited software programs. They don't have the intelligence to understand everything they see on the Internet. They use ever-evolving rules to score and rate a website's ability to answer a particular question. Armed with this knowledge, we can break the SEO process into three general categories:


1. HTML code optimisation: The first stage is the checking, and re-writing if necessary, of navigation and content structures on your website. SEs do not understand objects such as images, Flash, JavaScript etc. They will simply ignore them. There is no point proceeding any further if the SE cannot understand what it is seeing. Programmers undertake this category of SEO. A deep understanding of current web coding standards and techniques is necessary. Software packages often produce very poor results, and it usually takes a lot of human intervention to ensure optimum accessibility.


2. Content tailoring: A SE rates web pages according to their relevancy given a set of keywords. You must therefore tailor your content with these keywords in mind at all times. Fundamental to determining which keywords are relevant is an understanding of your target market. You must know the typical questions they ask to find answers. There are websites such as WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com) that can help you to determine commonly used keywords. Remember: this is not a race to see how many keywords can fill the page. There is an optimum keyword density. Too dense and it is considered stuffing or spamming - you will be penalised. Too little, and you are not considered an authoritative source. Choosing to hone in on a specific set of keywords per page is also prudent. You are not trying to optimise for everybody on the Internet - only those who ask a specific question.


3. Cutting-edge optimisation: SEs use algorithms that are proprietary secrets and continually evolve over time. Categories 1 and 2 focus on making your website accessible to SEs and ensuring you have high quality content. These are well-established principles guaranteed to improve your rankings - regardless of how the SE algorithms advance. To give their clients an advantage, SEO practitioners can sometimes try to abuse the SE algorithms. They may take advantage of loopholes or shady methods. A simple example is 'stuffing' a page with invisible text - white text on a white background. This is invisible to humans, but SEs used to index this content. If taken one-step further by stuffing the page with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it becomes 'spamming'. SEs are smarter today and will notice these devious tricks. Websites using them will be heavily penalised. Category 3 is a moving target - and hence carries risk if poorly executed. What works today is innovative, but may be heavily penalised in the future once people abuse it to skew results. You should always be wary of introducing any initiatives that fall into this category.



So if you decide to give your site the SEO treatment, how long before you see the results? Google re-indexes websites everyday of the year. The process it follows ensures every entry in its database is re-indexed every 4-6 weeks. Google will re-index 'news' sites much quicker - almost daily - to stay current. Other SEs use roughly similar periods between re-indexes. Therefore it can take up to 4-6 weeks for changes in the ranking to be observed. Will the three categories in SEO improve your ranking? Yes. Will they keep you there? No. The SE algorithms evolve over time. SEO is a form of marketing and is therefore an on going process of monitoring, obtaining feedback and tweaking. Most companies do not release a ton of advertising material with getting feedback as to how they can improve it in the future.

Please remember that SEO is not the ultimate and final word on creating a profitable web presence. It is only one aspect of your Internet marketing strategy. A good SEO practitioner understands this. They realise that there is more to the Internet than just search engines. Obtaining links from reputable websites, advertising using traditional media and ensuring your customers recommend you to their friends is just as important. If they don't reflect this in their overall strategy, consider someone else who does.

Towards a New Philosophy of SEO

The following overview of a common SEO campaign is not an attempt to describe the processes in use by all SEO's, and in fact there are a handful of really good SEO firms out there. Good SEO firms are generally identifiable by two common elements: Longevity and Customer Loyalty Overview of a common SEO Campaign:

II - On Page Optimization: • a) Add textual content that is keyword rich - Embed pre-determined target keywords throughout text according to the SEO's notion of ideal keyword density and usage. • b) Add Title and Meta Tags that are keyword rich - Often this involves composing code that is extremely keyword dense, which fortunately is no longer an effective technique to manipulate rankings on most search engines. • c) Miscellaneous other elements such as Anchor Texts, Alt Text, etc. are manipulated to increase keyword density. II - Off Page Optimization: • a) Link Building - Ideally this involves finding related but non-competing web sites of high quality to exchange links with. However automated ink spamming is a common practice that is employed, which although initially effective, can result in expulsion from search indexes. Furthermore link spamming degrades the overall quality of the WWW. III - Adjustment: • a) On a regular basis the various "optimized" elements are adjusted in an attempt to find an ideal combination that will result in top rankings for the target keywords. This is quite often a lot of guesswork and wishful thinking. The Mission of this type of campaign is to take an existing website, regardless of quality and Make it Appear to be the Best. When such a campaign is successful, the SEO has succeeded in reducing the quality of search results for that keyword by positioning a web site that does not deserve a top position. Furthermore link spamming reduces the quality of the internet link graph by forging unnatural connectivity families.

Overview of Proposed SEO Campaign:

I - Ground Up Solutions: • a) The construction of innovative, high quality websites that are built according to concepts that reflect knowledge of search engine technology. • b) Rejection of existing websites as a standard with few exceptions. Offer complete solutions of design and SEO to insure uncompromising quality. II - New SEO Methodology: • a) Traditional SEO techniques should be abandoned to pursue a true Search Engine knowledgebase resulting from scientifically sound research. • b) Abandon the concept of "tricking" search engines into ranking web pages and focus on building websites of high enough quality that they can rank well based upon their own merit. • c) Citation development will still be an integral part of this campaign however new systems, standards of quality and types of citations are implemented and enforced such that the idea of link building no longer accurately describes this process. A New Philosophy for Search Engine Optimization The Mission of this type of campaign is to build a highly optimized web site that Is the Best. Websites will achieve top rankings for 2 reasons: 1. They are constructed as comprehensive authorities within their industry. 2. They are designed to make the most of their natural strengths through an understanding of search technologies.

How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking - PART 2

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.
Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign.

Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.